General McChrystal’s Three Biggest Strategic Errors in Dealing With Rolling Stone

Everyone’s talking about “The Runaway General,” Michael Hastings’s blockbuster profile of General Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone. In a shocking breach of military decorum, the general and his aides, who refer to themselves as Team America (yes, it’s a South Park reference), trash the president, the vice president, the special envoy to the region (Richard Holbrooke), the ambassador to Afghanistan (Karl Eikenberry), and damn near everyone else in the Obama administration who isn’t named Hillary Clinton or Robert Gates.

McChrystal is known for being a master strategist, which only makes it more necessary to ask: What the hell was he thinking? He made plenty of major errors on the road to this fiasco, but here are the three biggest:1. Talking On the Record with Rolling Stone at a Bar

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock since the Summer of Love, you know that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner doesn’t support any war effort (Vietnam, The first Bush’s War, the second Bush’s War, the second Bush’s second war, and now, Obama’s War). So it’s extremely difficult to imagine what could have possessed McChrystal when he agreed to talk, on the record, with a reporter from Rolling Stone while out drinking with Team America. (On the 33rd anniversary of his wedding, no less!) He also allowed Hastings to sit in during a number of other casual conversations, with disastrous (for the general) results.

Most Tasteless Quote: “‘Who’s he going to dinner with?’ I ask one of his aides. ‘Some fucking French minister,’ the aide tells me. ‘It’s fucking gay.’”

Trashing the Entire Obama Administration

If you want to air your frustrations with the White House, do it on your own watch. Openly criticizing everyone behind the war effort in front of a reporter—calling Holbrooke a “wounded animal,” for example—isn’t going to win you any allies in Washington. And no matter how many times you apologize, you’ll never be forgiven for hating on the president. The only question now is whether McChrystal, who has been summoned to Washington for tomorrow’s monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan, is going to be fired or merely submit to an administrative castration.

Most Absurd Quote: “‘Are you asking about Vice President Biden?’ McChrystal says with a laugh. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Biden,’ suggests a top adviser. ‘Did you say bite me?’”

Believing Your Own Mythology

General McChrystal, as this and many other profiles have portrayed him, is an intellectual and athletic bad-ass. He eats one meal a day. He went on patrols with commandos as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command. He lives on four hours of sleep. Runs seven miles a day. Partied at West Point with no regard for military brass. With McChrystal, you have a man who actually convinced President Obama—an intellectual bad-ass in his own right—to do something he campaigned against doing. So Obama ramped up the war efforts, promised another 30,000 troops, and gave McChrystal his full support. Somewhere along the way, however, his ego got the better of his vaunted strategic judgment. To even think that he could say such things outside of a tight-knit, private circle without them being repeated reflects a woeful lack of self-awareness. Meanwhile, Hastings quotes a number of soldiers who aren’t quite as enamored with McChrystal as he might imagine.

Most Damning Quote: “‘Bottom line?’ says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real solider will tell you the same thing.’”

UPDATE: NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel spoke with Hastings, who said that the unprecedented access—nearly a month with the general—was not how the military or Rolling Stone had imagined it. Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano trapped the reporter in Paris with McChrystal and his staff. Engel’s comments:

“I just hung up the phone with Michael Hastings who wrote the article for Rolling Stone and—he said it was something of an accident—this article was never meant to be like this. What happened was, Michael Hastings presented this idea to the military, to McChrystal’s military advisors, media advisors, saying ‘I want to do this profile’ ... they agreed, and he was supposed to have two days with him in Paris and then followed up another visit in Afghanistan.”

It appears that McChrystal and his aides may have let their guard down after they got used to having Hastings around.